Staff

Andrew Jackson

In September, 2012 he retired from a long career as Chief Economist and Director of Social and Economic Policy with the Canadian Labour Congress.

In 2011, he was awarded the Sefton Prize by the University of Toronto for his lifetime contributions to industrial relations. Educated at the University of British Columbia and the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he earned a B. Sc. and an M.Sc. in Economics, Andrew is the author of numerous articles and five books, including Work and Labour in Canada: Critical Issues, which is now in its second edition with Canadian Scholars Press.

Posts & Activities by Andrew Jackson

Data from the 2016 Census show that income inequality grew quite significantly over the previous decade from 2005 to 2015, and that the supposedly most progressive part of our overall tax system failed to make much of a difference. This underlines the need for progressive tax reform in the next federal budget.

In last month's Fall Economic Statement, the federal government promised to enhance the Working Income Tax Benefit (WITB) through additional annual funding of $500 Million starting in 2019. Canadians were invited to provide input on how the additional funding should be used, with the details to be announced in the 2018 federal budget.

Employment Insurance or EI flies beneath the political radar much of the time, but remains an important and relevant part of the Canadian social safety net. Changes are needed to respond to new labour market realities, but the program should not, as some argue, be folded into a universal basic income.

The German election results mark a major set back for progressives in that country, with serious implications for the European Union and for global economic governance.

Note that German voters elect a candidate in each constituency and also vote for a party. The final distribution of seats in the Parliament closely reflects the share of the national vote won by each party, with a 5% of the vote threshold to gain representation.

The 2016 Census income data released today shows that family and individual incomes rose significantly for most of the population in the decade from 2005 to 2015, mainly due to the resource boom that extended through most of the period. The median total income of families adjusted for inflation rose by a healthy 10.8 per cent. But the gains were unequally shared, and some families and individuals fell behind.

Leading progressive academic economist Steve Keen gained international recognition after he successfully predicted the 2007 global crisis using an alternative macro-economic model built on the pioneering work of Hyman Minsky and Wynne Godley. His new book, “Can we avoid another financial crisis?” argues that the lessons of the crash have still not been learned by the economic policy mainstream, and that a new crisis looms for some highly indebted countries, including Canada.

On July 13th, the Bank of Canada began to tighten monetary policy, arguing that the economy would be operating at full capacity by the end of this year. This action was guided more by the economic dogma of a “natural” unemployment rate crafted by Milton Friedman back in the 1970s than by hard evidence of a looming increase in inflation.

On July 13th, the Bank of Canada modestly hiked interest rates and argued that the economy would be operating at full capacity by the end of this year. The International Monetary Fund recently said that Canada would lead growth among the big economies in 2017 as a global economic recovery finally begins to take hold.

Due to the strong lobbying efforts of labour and social activists, Canada's minimum wage floor is rising significantly from the current level of between $11 and $12 per hour depending upon the province. A new norm of $15 per hour will be in place, in Alberta by October, 2018, in Ontario by January, 2019, and very likely in British Columbia under the terms of the NDP-Green Party agreement.

On May 23, Statistics Canada released an interesting and widely reported study by Yuri Ostrovsky, with the title “Doing as Well as One's Parents?” It showed that some two thirds of Canadian children born between 1970 and 1984 (broadly speaking, the children of baby-boomers) had, at age 30, family incomes at least as high as their parents at the same age and that this proportion has been stable.

Global Affairs Canada is conducting public consultations on a possible Canada-China Free Trade Agreement. Based on the record since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, further liberalization of trade and investment on the current model would not benefit most Canadians.

Following the ground breaking work of Branko Milanovic at the World Bank, economists increasingly accept that the rules of the liberal global economy have produced both winners and losers. The big winners have been the top one percent around the world who have benefited from a global rise in corporate profits and senior executive incomes and, to a degree, workers in developing countries who have enjoyed rising real wages.

It is now three months into the Presidency of Donald Trump, and policy makers around the world are still unsure how to respond to the new administration's challenge to the liberal global order and the looming threat of “America First” trade policies.

Economics textbooks generally begin with a simple model in which prices of goods and services are determined by supply and demand in competitive markets and firms are “price-takers.” Yet it is much closer to reality to view the world we live in as one in which a handful of very large companies dominate most markets and have the power to administer prices so as to earn well above average profits or “rents.”

While Canadians are understandably focused on what the election of President Trump means for our bilateral trading relationship and the future of NAFTA, a much bigger issue for the global economy is the pending clash between the United States and China.

The major challenge for the federal government in the budget was to maintain its commitment to progressive social and economic policies in the face of criticism from the right for its supposedly profligate fiscal policies and unwise promises to make the tax system more progressive. The government was also urged to trim its sails in the face of pending tax cuts in the United States.

The major challenge for the federal government in the budget expected this month is to maintain its commitment to progressive social and economic policies in the context of a major shift to the political right in the United States.